Rab Butler

Richard Austen "Rab" Butler (9 December 1902-8 March 1982) was the British Chancellor of the Exchequer from 28 October 1951 to 20 December 1955, succeeding Hugh Gaitskell and preceding Harold Macmillan. He was a member of the Conservative Party.

Biography
Richard Austen Butler was born in Attock, Punjab, British Raj on 9 December 1902, and he was educated at Cambridge before being elected to Parliament in 1929 as a Conservative Party MP. In 1932, he became Under-Secretary of State for India, and he worked for the Ministry of Labor before becoming an Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office in 1938. Despite his support for appeasement and the Munich Agreement, he remained in government under Winston Churchill, who promoted him to become President of the Board of Education in 1941. He was responsible fo rthe 1944 Education Act, which built the framework for postwar education in England through the introduction of free secondary schooling open to all who passed the "11-plus" examinations. In opposition from 1945 to 1951, as chairman of the Conservative Research Department, he was influential in persuading the Conservative Party to accept the principles of the welfare state introduced by William Beveridge and Clement Attlee's government. During the subsequent years of Conservative government, he became Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1951 to 1955, Home Secretary from 1957 to 1962, and Foreign Secretary from 1963 to 1964. In these posts, he was associated with dissolving the Central African Federation, persuading the Treasury to build more prisons, presiding over periods of increased living standards, and reluctantly restricting immigration from the Commonwealth. Despite his prominence and seniority within the party, he failed to gain the Conservative Party leadership, losing it to Anthony Eden in 1955, Harold Macmillan in 1957, and Alec Douglas-Home in 1963. He became Mster of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1964, but he continued sporadic political activity in the House of Lords after 1965. He died in 1982 at the age of 79.